Poem fractal

Three Songs

by A. Mary F. Robinson

27 February 1857 to 9 February 1944 (~87)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“How dreary the state and rank of your second-best great poet, enthroned in dismal glory on the less frequented slopes of Parnassus!”

Observing that formal reputation may bring less affection than intimate readership · Preface to her Collected Poems (1902)

More remarks (8)

Drawing the boundary…

Read the poem Another poem

A fractal is a shape that keeps its pattern when you look closer. Coastlines, trees, shells, and weather do this. A poem can be drawn the same way.

The poem’s constant is read from the build of its lines: their length, the size of the stanzas, and the share of vowels. Poems whose constants lie closer together are built more alike. The same poem always draws the same picture. Change the length of a line, the stanza, or the vowel share, and both the number and the picture move.

Primunia is the name for the source of that order: the pattern under the pattern, already there in a tree, a shell, and a verse.

Poems nearby in the constant

A smaller distance means the lines are built more alike.

  1. Alfred Austin · 0.1354 − 0.6834i · 0.017 away · Compare side by side
  2. Archibald MacLeish · 0.1503 − 0.7152i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  3. Mathilde Blind · 0.1086 − 0.7017i · 0.029 away · Compare side by side
  4. William Butler Yeats · 0.1689 − 0.7017i · 0.031 away · Compare side by side
  5. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · 0.1656 − 0.6817i · 0.034 away · Compare side by side
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